Block-I/O in Haskell

Tomasz Zielonka writes:
> Did you consider using floating-point Timeout type, with
> its values representing seconds, possibly fractional?
> This could have some negative performance impact, but
> would be elegant IMHO.
It certainly is more elegant, but I personally would rather
not have these calculations from Double to Int in the
low-level routines. I think it would be better to wrap
'timeout' with a separate function which does this, so that
people can choose whether they'd like to specify the timeout
in microseconds or in a fraction of seconds.
Thinking about it, these conversions would probably be
useful on their own right, independently from any timeout
functions.
> 2^31 microseconds is not such long
You are right, that's less than 36 minutes. Quite
surprising. I've added an appropriate warning to the
documentation -- thanks for the hint!
Peter